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Meet Paawaan Kothari, the chaiwalli

Paawan Kothari quit a high profile job to sell tea on the streets of San Francisco

| Jun 5, 2010, 04.11 PM IST

Paawan Kothari quit a high profile job to sell tea on the streets of San Francisco

Paawan Kothari was a marketing strategist for IBM. Now she drives down the streets of San Francisco on a bicycle converted into a chai cart and sells cups of tea. It sounds like a case study of a recession victim, a sort of pulling-yourself-up-by-thebootstraps (or tea leaves) story. But in reality, Kothari quit IBM because she was burned out. "I wanted to be creative. I wanted to engage with people," she says. But didn't the idea of strapping a thermos to a bicycle trailer and cycling around San Francisco's hilly streets seem rather extreme? It's not as if she'd always been a chai fanatic. "I am more of a coffee drinker," Kothari admits. "For tea, I used tea bags. Chai was more of a Sunday thing."

Street food carts have become quite the culinary trend in the San Francisco Bay Area. There was the creme brulee man, Mexican taco trucks and CurryUpNow for kaathi rolls and pav bhaaji. Fans followed these mobile food vans on Twitter and showed up at street corners where they parked. Kothari noticed that what you couldn't get was good authentic chai. "You have hot dog stands, taco stands, so why not a chai cart?" she says. She thought it would be a good pastime while she tried to figure out what she wanted to do with her life and career.

Within 10 days she had a bicycle trailer made, got carafes and a thermos, made two flavours of chai — ginger and mint — and showed up at the park. That was in August 2009. "I thought I might do it for a couple of weeks," she says. She enjoyed it so much she started doing it every weekend. "Now even if I don't feel like doing it, there is pressure that people are looking for you."

Her repertoire has expanded. Cardamom , lemongrass, black pepper, Mexican chocolate, malt, even green chilli (" it has the flavour of green chilli but not the heat.") Now she's experimenting with a salty, buttery chai from Bhutan. "It doesn't sound appealing, but I'll try it," she says. That's the beauty of The Chai Cart (www.thechaicart.com). If it doesn't work you can toss the batch and just start over again. "Chai is quite forgiving and anything works as long as you can't taste the bitterness. I make sure I use good milk and good spices," says Kothari.

She's also learned quite a bit about teas. She knew she wanted bold flavours — Assam tea or Brooke Bond. She wanted to get organic teas but they were too expensive. But Kothari is a purist about the spices — authentic Indian spices for her masala chai. She also has her own chai masala mix that she wants to patent and sell online. And she also nurtures dreams of a chai franchise — a sort of chai cart in every city. Otherwise, she says, her chai business is only about making pocket money. That's where the marketing strategy of the MBA kicks in. "One needs to franchise; it should be a unique concept, otherwise the barrier to entry is too high," she says. It sounds like a business plan with market research, but back in India, her family was a little befuddled. They were indulgent with the chai idea as long as it was a weekend hobby. There were jokes about being a chaiwalli but she says, "there is something romantic about a chai cart in San Francisco. It is picture-postcard romantic." The hills reaching out to touch the bay, the blue waters speckled with sailboats... On a summer afternoon, the fog will suddenly roll in. But reality is more sobering. "I was caught in a hailstorm once," remembers Kothari. "My fingers were freezing. I also had a flat tyre. I was so miserable that I wrote a blog about it."

If the tea was not confusing enough for her family, now she's branched out into another venture called Green Coriander. It's healthy, organic Indian food for delivery, a break from the usual cream and oil that have become the staple of desi food in the West. "My folks said you haven't ever cooked for more than 10 people, what are you doing," she says. But even with Green Coriander, Kothari does not want a sit-down restaurant with infrastructure costs. She wants it quick, easy and healthy. In the process of running her own chai cart, Kothari has learned the nuts and bolts of a start up in a way she could never have imagined at IBM. She's learned about street permits and health inspector codes. She's gone to San Francisco city hall with other street vendors to demand amendments to rules and regulations. But best of all, 15 years after she moved to the US from Hyderabad, Kothari has finally found a community.

"As an immigrant, I always felt this was a place I lived in," she says. "Now I belong. Now I am part of a street cart movement. We share a Google group. We re-tweet about each other," she says. Her clientele includes non-Indians curious about chai. It includes Indians who want the nostalgia of hot steaming roadside chai. Some even bring their parents to check it out. Her own parents are proving harder to convert. On a trip back to India, Kothari offered to make chai for her mother. "She said no, let me make it my way. You make yours for the Americans," she chuckles.

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